Mangzhi Tea Mountain is located in Xiangming Township, Mengla County, Dehong Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province, adjacent to Gedeng Mountain. It is said to be the place where Zhuge Liang buried copper (Mang), hence it was named Mangzhi Mountain. The area of Mangzhi Tea Mountain is not large, but its tea quality is good, similar to that of Gedeng tea, with slightly weaker qi, less bitterness and astringency, faster sweet aftertaste, and a lingering aroma in the Cup. Before the establishment of Pu'er Prefecture, Han merchants had already come to Mangzhi Tea Mountain to buy tea. According to Ni Tui's “Yunnan Annual History,” “In the sixth year of Yongzheng (AD 1728), tea was produced in Mangzhi, and merchants suffered losses; often they stayed with the tea farmers, purchasing tea on-site and transporting it in turns to the inland areas.” During its most prosperous period, tea gardens covered the mountains, and villages were densely packed. Mangzhi Village, Yanglin Village, and Niuguntang Street were the liveliest places. In Niuguntang Street, there was a temple for five monks, and every March during Spring Tea picking, local tea farmers would go to the temple to offer incense and worship their tea god ancestors. Today, the former temple has become ruins, and only a stele engraved with “Forever Adhered To” lies on the ground.

At the end of the Qing Dynasty's Xianfeng era, ethnic clashes occurred around Niuguntang, severely impacting the tea industry of Mangzhi Tea Mountain. Tea farmers fled, villages relocated, and merchants avoided the area. What was once a bustling Niuguntang became uninhabited by the late Qing Dynasty. That large village, once home to hundreds of households, turned into a dense forest rarely visited by people, although one can still occasionally see tea forests of varying sizes, with large-leaf and small-leaf tea plants mixed with other vegetation. The main town of Mangzhi Tea Mountain is Niuguntang Street, where the majority of residents are outsiders engaged in tea cultivation, collection, and trading. By the late Qianlong period, Mangzhi Tea Mountain had tens of thousands of mu of tea gardens. Every spring and autumn, horse caravans from Simao, Pu'er, and Jiangcheng came in batches to Niuguntang to transport tea, with an annual production reaching tens of thousands of dan. Now, from the stele erected in the winter of the eleventh year of Qianlong, we can still faintly glimpse the prosperous scene of the tea mountain back then. Due to various reasons, Mangzhi Tea Mountain began to decline in the late 1940s and did not recover until the 1980s. The tea from the ancient Mangzhi Tea Mountain belongs to the medium-sized leaf type of arbor tea, with a deep orange-yellow soup color, initially bitter and astringent, followed by a strong sweet aftertaste and quick salivation, and a fresh fragrance.